Outsourcing – when is it the right time?

Executive Support

As a small business owner you wear a hundred different hats every day. You are the customer services rep, the bookkeeper, the office manager and much much more. Juggling your business with everyday life can be tricky enough, but what happens when life takes an unusual turn. Who do you trust to help you with your business?

At Virtual Angels, we have had a rather busy couple of months. Until recently Nicola had been working on the business part-time balancing it against full-time employment. During May/June she took a long break to visit family in Australia. In addition to our business, I have a busy volunteer role and in June, I got married. Neither of us have many minutes to spare!

For the sake of our sanity and our business, we took the decision to engage the lovely Karen from Little Acorn Marketing to help us. With Nicola coming on board full time, we need to keep our social media fresh to reach out to potential clients, in addition to continuing to build our profile and business relationships. It was a scary decision to make, trusting someone outside our business partnership to represent us online. It was the best decision we made and was a weight off both our shoulders. We’d already spent some time with Karen developing our marketing strategy, so she had a good idea of what our business was about. We’ve seen our followers on Twitter increase and our Facebook page is brimming with interesting content.

Outsourcing doesn’t have to be permanent option. We’ve done it to support us through a period of transition. Many business owners do it to offload the tasks they dislike or are not strong at. There’s no shame in saying, ‘I’m not very good at that, I’ll ask someone else to do it’ – e.g. formatting a PowerPoint presentation – this could take three or four hours of your time if it’s not your strong point, however, it could take someone with strong PowerPoint skills an hour – that’s two to three hours saved. How much would you have been paid to do what your good at in those two to three hours? That’s the money you save when outsourcing – the money you don’t necessarily see.

Or, like us, you could outsource to provide you with support at a particular period of time. With school holidays upon us, many parents are juggling their business with entertaining their children or acting as taxi for various activities. You may even be going on holiday and be wondering how you’re going to manage the explosion of emails that occur while you are away. A Virtual Assistant could monitor those emails for you, removing the junk mail, prioritizing the emails that need your immediate attention on return and sending holding responses so your customers don’t think you’ve forgotten them!

So be brave! Trust your business to someone else, so you can truly enjoy the reason you went in to business in the first place.

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